Menno van Driel

Sellers often ask me if THIS is a good time to sell or if it would be better to wait. In other words, what do I think the market is going to do? Is there an official answer to that question?

The market, what's it going to do? Is it going to go up or down? Or as a third option: is it perhaps going to be quite stable? Those that know may say so now!

As often as I hear “should I sell now or la ...

Pretty much every mortgage needs to be “renewed” from time to time. That’s when the mortgage term runs out. On many cases, those terms are for five years (fixed or variable); sometimes shorter (three years, for instance) and rarely longer (7 or 10 years).

Many people feel somewhat intimidated when that renewal letter comes in from the bank. There's no need - you can start negotiating instead ...

How does that really go with agents; I have my agent, you have yours? Or sometimes, do we share one and the same agent. Or occasionally, we don’t have an agent at all. How does that work and how can you benefit in these possible situations?

When you go to your lawyer, you know it's YOUR lawyer. It's not always the same with real estate agents, actually it can be rather complicated to know wh ...

Working in real estate, I get these questions ALL the time. What do I think, where is the market headed, what is the outlook? Are prices going up or down? “Really, what do YOU think?”

We'd all be rich if we knew, for sure, where the market is going. In reality, nobody does, although there many who have an opinion.

The for-ever question of what “the market” is going to do, keeps people busy ...

When you may even know that a Bee Arr (BR) means bedroom, you might blink when you’re confronted with an S/S D/W. No kidding, this normally would imply a Stainless Steel Dishwasher.

Imagine the jargon you can throw at a bathroom like this. Those are S/S sinks, aren't they? What do we mean, Steam Ship sinks? Er no, we mean Stainless Steel.

In real estate advertising, as in many other busines ...

How is it ever possible that two people with virtually similar mortgage loans will get different rates at the same bank? How do banks determine who gets the better rate? What are the “rules”?

Everybody knows, these days, that banks' posted mortgage rates are not what you'll actually end up paying. There are discounts, a bit more for some than for others.

People tend to brag about how good a ...

BC Ferries’ website has got a lot more colourful just recently, in an attempt to update the old, slow and complicated server website that was supposed to keep us up-to-date on the operations of the ferry system.

BC Ferries bring together the big city and our quiet, rural and friendly Sunshine Coast communities. The ferry system works quite well.

What hasn’t changed is the URL for the main p ...

Vancouver received a powerful visitor last week: Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney. He sounded the alarm bells about run-away house prices in the Vancouver market.

There are parts of Vancouver where a $900,000 house is considered a bargain. Obviously not quite a neighbourhood for people with a modest income.

Mr Carney was pronouncing a stern warning about the dangerous combination of rapi ...

The world of real estate is never boring, there’s always something going on. There are continuous changes in the market, in real estate laws, their interpretation, agency issues and jargon. Of course, this applies to the affiliated fields of finance and inspection services as well.

Real estate questions, in the information age, can often be answered by researching the appropriate websites. H ...